16 His mischief will return upon his own head,
And his violence will descend upon his own pate. 17
¶I will give thanks to the LORD according to His righteousness, And will sing praise to the name of the LORD Most High.’
In this text both levels are highly prominent: the “top” or access level, that is, the encoding situation, which is for much of the psalm a prayer to God; and the “lower” or accessed level, dealing with a
particular situation the psalmist is describing, involving an enemy sometimes plural enemies. The indicated paragraphs follow the NASB, which for present purposes I will follow. The first three
paragraphs vv 1–2, 3–5, 6–7 have prominent vocative and second person references to God, whereas in the remainder of the psalm references to God are in the third person, with the exception of a brief
intercalated prayer vv 8b–9a. Whereas in vv 1–7 the encoding situation prayer is highly prominent, in vv 8–17 it is much less so, but it still remains close. Since God is a participant in both the access space as
addressee and in the accessed space as the righteous judge, he is potentially a second or a third person referent at any point. This in itself is not remarkable, but the apparent ease with which the Hebrew writer
switches between second and third person—which may seem strange to us—is a linguistic expression of the easy switching of attention and conceptual interpenetration between the encoding situation and the
accessed situation.
115
The easy interpenetration between accessor and accessed spaces is itself just one manifestation of the more general phenomenon of seemingly unannounced changes involving the accessor space.
•
In Psalm 14 the topic of the accessed space is the wicked except for the last verse of the psalm, v 7. In v 5, the psalmist invites his addressees to join him as virtual accessors in viewing the topic: ‘There
they are in great dread….’ In the following verse v 6, for a single time in the psalm, the psalmist addresses the wicked in the second person: ‘You would put to shame the counsel of the afflicted….’
This modifies the accessor space by “pulling up” into it the accessed topic, to function as addressee.
•
In the 9 verses of Psalm 20 the accessor space has three distinct configurations: vv 1–5 addressed to the king, vv 6–8 addressed neither to the king nor to God, v 9 addressed to God.
•
In Isaiah the first person singular is often used in a formally ambiguous way: it is not clear whether it refers to the prophet in the accessor space or to another speaker being cited as having his own
accessor space within the prophet’s accessed space. In 61:1, for example: ‘The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted….’ That is,
there are seemingly unannounced switches between accessor spaces on the two levels.
Because of modern literary techniques, the Western reader is accustomed to unannounced changes in the accessed space, although he can still sympathize with the Ethiopian eunuch’s question in Acts 8:34:
“Please tell me, of whom does the prophet say this? Of himself, or of someone else?” But unannounced changes in the accessor space are predictably more difficult, since that is the locus of the epistemics of the
text.
3.7 Universals of topicality
The above sections mention various ways in which languages function similarly in regard to topicality. I know of no extensive typological studies of discourse topicality, although considerable work
has been done in regard to topicality on the sentence utterance level. Gundel 1988:231f. lists the following of putative universals of information structure of the sentence
utterance, including sentence topics. As the footnotes indicate, some of these may need to be qualified.
•
“In all languages, an expression which refers to the topic of a sentence is typically definite or generic.
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“If a language has topic markers, then these will always be postpositional and basic word order in the language will almost always be SOV.
116 115
A further complexity in this psalm is the subject reference in vv 12–13. The solution, which I will not go into here, seems to be related to discourse topicality and subsequent activation of participants.
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Topic markers may be limited to topics in access function, and may more generally be access markers §3.5.1.
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“If a language has topic markers then it will be highly topic-prominent according to the criteria established in Li and Thompson, 1976.
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“Every language has syntactic topic constructions in which an expression which refers to the topic of the sentence is adjoined to the left of a full sentence comment [left-detached topics; RAD].
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“Every language has syntactic topic constructions in which an expression which refers to the topic of the sentence is adjoined to the right of a full sentence comment [right-detached topics; RAD].
117
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“Every language has cleft constructions, either wh-clefts or it-clefts or both.
118
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“Every language has ‘double-subject’ constructions.
119
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“All languages have constructions whose function it is to place topic, both old and new, before comment; all languages have constructions whose primary function is to place new or contrastive
topics at the beginning of the sentence; and all languages have constructions whose function is place focus at the beginning of the sentence and old, already established topics at the end.
120
However, no language has constructions whose function is to place new topics at the end of the sentence.
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“The more topic-prominent a language, the less restricted the distribution of zero anaphora in that language.
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“The more topic-prominent a language, the fewer subject-creating constructions it will have.
121
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“If a language topic-comment structure is coded by intonation [as it is in almost every language, p. 230; RAD], then primary stress always falls inside the focus.
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“The most neutral position for focus in a language will be the position normally occupied by the direct object.”
Lambrecht 1994 proposes further universals for sentence-level topicality:
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“Subjects are UNMARKED TOPICS and … the topic-comment articulation is the UNMARKED PRAGMATIC SENTENCE ARTICULATION” op. cit., p. 132.
122
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By far most languages utilize the topic-comment order for unmarked topic expression, for accented topic expressions op. cit., p. 202.
123
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Across languages, marked topic expressions tend to have similar signals and occur in overlapping discourse functions; left-detached topics, for example, are often contrastive or partitive see
Lambrecht 1994 §4.4.4.2 for other functions in English.
•
Detached topics are generally at least semiactive op. cit., p. 183.
117
Stephen Levinsohn p.c. states that in some Bantu languages this may only occur in oral material, if at all.
118
Wh-clefts or pseudo-clefts “have the structure NP BE NP, where the first NP, which refers to the topic, is a usually headless relative clause construction and the second NP is the focus” Gundel 1988:223f., as in What I
want is THIS ONE. In cleft or it-cleft constructions, “comment precedes topics” and “have the form [it BE NP] [NP], where the first NP is focus and the second NP is a headless relative clause that descrives the topic” Gundel
1988:226, as in It is THIS ONE that I want.
119
A ‘double-subject’ construction has a topic which is “adjoined to a full sentence comment which lacks a co- referring expression”: My work, I’m going crazy Gundel 1988:224.
120
The claim regarding sentence-initial focus apparently does not hold in certain Bantu languages, including Mambila Perrin 1994:233.
121
A ‘subject-creating’ construction has “a noun phrase that refers to the topic occurs as the surface subject of a
clause, but is not the logical subject of that clause” loc. cit.. Examples include This child was bitten by your dog, Your battery
seems to be dead, George is difficult to talk to, My soup has a fly in it Gundel 1988:223, 225.
Stephen Levinsohn p.c. states that N.W. Austronesian languages of the Philippine type provide evidence against this claim.
122
Lambrecht’s statement is a cross-linguistic generalization, not a claim about individual utterances in context.
123
Givón 1989:223, 226 states that “the topic-before-comment generalization” holds only for “important topics.” Both Lambrecht’s accented topic expressions and Givón’s important topics—those that are topics in the sense of the
present treatment—appear to be topic expressions that serve the access function.
•
“In contrast with left-detachment, the lexical or independent-pronominal topic expression in right- detached position cannot indicate a new topic or a topic shift” op. cit., pp. 203f..
•
The comment of a topic-comment or the assertion of a point of departure-assertion construction is often internally structured as a further type of information structure op. cit., p. 126.
There is a fundamental typological difference between subject-prominent and topic-prominent languages, based originally on Li andThompson 1976. Gundel 1988:221 summarizes the criteria for
topic-prominent languages as follows: “They have no dummy subjects, passive constructions are marginal if they exist at all, zero NP-anaphora are not syntactically restricted…and basic sentence structure is
determined by topic-comment relations rather than by grammatical relations such as subject and object. In addition, all but one of these languages [in her sample; RAD] have basic SOV order.”
Universals of discourse-level topicality might include the following:
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Topicality is a common global and local theme.
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Discourse topics can occur along with other themes.
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Discourse topics are presented before more inclusive themes.
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A paragraph-level topic is active throughout the paragraph and can be referred to with the language’s typical minimal coding expressions.
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A higher-level remote topic is active or semiactive throughout its textual span, at least for macro- levels one level above the paragraph.
Languages differ in regard to topicality in at least the following ways:
•
Languages are at different points on the scale of subject- vs. topic- prominence Li and Thompson 1976.
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Languages can differ radically in the conditions for and frequency of marked information structures see indices of markedness, Dooley 2005. “For example, Lambrecht 1980 observes that while left
dislocation receives a contrastive interpretation in Standard French, it is ‘neutral’ in non-standard French” Gundel 1988:228. “Double-subject” constructions constitute a basic sentence type in some
languages but not in others loc. cit..
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Languages differ somewhat in regard to discourse functions for topics with marked expressions. In Wayampi Tupi-Guarani, Brazil, resumptive topics tend to be clause-final rather than left-detached
as in English.
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Languages differ in ways of introducing discourse topics, especially global topics, and in the rigidity of their rules in doing so. In Bantu languages of Mozambique, the main participant is introduced first
unless another participant would provide easier access to an appropriate base space. In English, the options are quite varied.
•
Languages differ in how much subjective information occurs in narrative and in how it is signalled §3.6.2.
4 Translation issues
Although discourse topicality involves important translation issues, this treatment does not deal with them in a systematic way. In this section we discuss one such issue, followed by a brief listing of others.
4.1 Changing thematic structure in translation
